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This Place of Invitation

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Anjali, by Ramona Klee on Flickr
Anjali, by Romana Klee on Flickr

Reverb10 Day 03 Prompt: Moment. Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).

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I really like this prompt. Just reading it takes me back through so many experiences of 2010. As I do, I discover that, in general, I feel alive much of the time…much more than I used to before certain experiences awakened me to a different way to be in life.

Feeling most alive isn’t always the same as feeling good. For me, it’s not about peak experiences.

That being said, as I went back through the year to pick one moment, my mind went to peak experiences (it’s hard to teach an old dog…):

Traveling in Ireland and climbing Croagh Patrick alongside barefoot teenage boys or standing on the peat in Connemara or hearing live Irish music and feeling my body light up with the joy of music from the heart…all immensely pleasurable experiences. My mind also searched for other highlighted moments of the year, something that stood out as different from the others. As I sat with so many choices, my time to write ran out as I had to head out the door for yoga.

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Today, the teacher asked if we had any requests for class (something she does when the class is small). A number of requests were voiced. Then she mentioned that usually when she asks that question, someone pipes up with ‘Power Yoga’. I realized that’s what I wanted today…to sweat hard and to push the boundaries of what my body can do. So I raised my hand to make it clear that’s what I wanted.

She laughed.

She obliged.

She seemed to fill all our requests taking us from intense twists, to shoulder openers, to hip flexor stretches, to optional Chaturanga, and even a one-legged Chaturanga for me, the one that wanted power yoga.

Then she led us into pigeon pose. And here in the intense opening of pigeon pose, I remembered the prompt for today. I sat with the question of what it is to feel fully alive as my entire pelvic girdle was responding to the invitation to open.

I could feel the tightness of those muscles hanging on as if to say, “It’s up to us to keep things under control.”. And, balanced with that tightness, I could feel my skeleton resting on the ground, responding to the muscles saying, “It’s okay. I’ve got it. You can let go.”

Alongside this conversation between the muscles and the bones, there was another conversation. I noticed that feeling of something deeper, what I can only call deep awareness, holding my mind as it flitted about, trying to manage the perceived pain of the stretch in which the body was engaged. This deeper place, this place of serenity and constancy simply invited me to let go, to drop in. I found myself dancing between simply being this place of invitation and being the mind with it’s manic need to manage the experience.

And then it happened. I let go. The muscles gave it over to the bones. The mind let go into the heart. The heart dropped into the body. Something deeper just held it all. And in this moment, I felt the physical palpable opening of the hips, where groin crease relaxed into thigh, and bones settled into the mat. Hot sweat dripped, while pain settled into sensation. Struggling to hold on let go.  Cranial fluid softly pulsed. Joy surfaced on the waves of breath.

It all became simple. Personality acceded to Self.

In this moment, I could feel muscles held by the bones, and bones held by the earth. I could feel the mind held by the heart, and the heart held by the body.

One let go into the next, and before I knew it I felt deeply alive. Human. Open. Trusting.

Invitation.

Invitee.

Invited.

Acceptance.

Simple.

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image, Anjali, by Romana Klee on Flickr (cc2.0 license)

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Yoga, Cleavage, Laughter & Namaste

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Namaste: My son Luka tells me sometimes, after I raise my voice at him: Now, calm down and concentrate... He is 6. Cracks me right up, and I start laughing, and can not bring myself to continue the tirade :)
Namaste: My son Luka tells me sometimes, after I raise my voice at him: " Now, calm down and concentrate..." He is 6. Cracks me right up, and I start laughing, and can not bring myself to continue the tirade 🙂

image attribution

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Each day of December, I am being moved to post by Gwen Bell’s Best of 2009 Blog Challenge:
Today is Day 29 Laugh. What was your biggest belly laugh of the year?

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So, this one’s hard for me. I’ve been sitting here thinking about how little I belly-laugh.

Sure, I watch Seinfeld reruns with Jeff, and we laugh until tears come…at the same old episodes. Like the one where Elaine dances like a freak.

Yes, in my family of origin, including sisters, offspring, their offspring, we completely lose it at holiday gatherings when someone farts. Especially my nephew, but I won’t out him here. Now, my eight year-old grandson is taking up the practice, having been gifted a whoopie cushion from said nephew. This Thanksgiving, when my two sisters and I, our four children, and our growing cluck of grandchildren (up to six now, with five being born in the last thirteen months) made sure we brought the Fart CD so we could regale ourselves, once again, with the pure joy that comes from potty humor.

But, all-in-all, I tend to be pretty serious. I tend to feel things deeply. I tend to write deep poetry and take long walks gazing at the beauty of life. I tend to dance and do yoga with a depth of concentration and intensity. So, when my big belly laugh happened this year, it wasn’t so much as a belly-acher or gut-buster, but it was more about the surprise that came when I could laugh really hard, along with others, at my own expense…in the middle of a hard work-out yoga flow class…taught by one of said sisters (the one that said, “Yes, I’ll take it” when asked if she wanted the ‘wicked-sense-of-humor’ gene just prior to conception. Of course, she is the older sister, so it was already taken by the time I was conceived).

Molly Fox, my sister, is quite the fabulous yoga/nia/pilates teacher. She is well-known on the East Coast for her fitness studio that she had in Manhattan for years in the eighties and early nineties.

It was in her Saturday morning class that my laugh moment of ’09 occurred. It’s not that it was that funny…it was funny to me…and to a class full of yogis. This is what happened.

I was in the front row, as I am wont to do in her classes. We were doing some kind of asana (don’t know the names at all) where  we were in a lunge with one knee on the ground. Molly was trying to get the class to lengthen the spine, rising and extending up from the center of the body, lifting the chest from below. She was explaining it, and then to help give people a better sense of what she was talking about, she came over to me, bent down beside me and said to the class, “Here. I’ll show you.” She quickly looked at me to ask if she could touch me, and when I acknowledged yes, she said, “This is my sister, so I can hold onto her breasts. Lift from here.” Of course, she didn’t grab my breasts. She gently held my rib cage and lifted me from deeper within my body. It was incredibly helpful to feel the difference between what I was doing and what she was suggesting.

I suddenly heard everyone break into laughter. I looked in the mirror. I realized I was wearing a pretty low-cut yoga top, and as she held me by the rib cage, being in front of the mirror with my breasts being raised up, much cleavage suddenly appeared front and center within the ‘very’ present awareness of everyone in the room. I didn’t know if they were laughing because of my being her sister, her comment, the sudden influx of cleavage, (couldn’t resist, Kelly) or all of the above, but I began to laugh, too. It all seemed pretty absurd and gloriously un-seriously yoga like. Molly’s classes are the best, ’cause she is so down-to-earth, so in love with her students, so good at what she does, and so damn funny.

Molly loves and respects the practice of yoga to the depth of her being AND she can have fun with it, which, to me, is the sign of a great teacher. Like Luka, the 6-year old son in the image caption at the top, a good teacher brings us back to reality, to the sanity of life that comes from not taking it all too seriously.

It’s here, in this not-too-serious place, that I can sometimes experience the deepest Namaste.

I think laugh will be my verb for 2010.

Maybe my noun will be cleavage, simply loving the cleavage that comes with womanhood. It may be about the cleaving away of what I think being a woman has to be from what I truly discover and experience it to be. Perhaps it might bring a softer, more loving embrace of my womanhood.

Maybe, just maybe, being with it all as it unfolds is the Namaste, the deepest bow, to what is.

What about you? I’d love to know, what makes you laugh? What is your verb for 2010? Your noun? Your ideas for bringing fun, laughter and ease to your world? Your best belly-laugh? Your ’09 cleavage story? Your real-life experience of Namaste?

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To Sweat IS to Glisten

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“Horses Sweat, Men Perspire, Women Glisten” ~ Grandma

Yes, this is what my grandmother would say to me when I was young. You see, I was one of these kids who would go outside to play, and within 10 minutes my coat would be off and I would have a line of sweat all the way across my upper lip. I loved to play and I loved to play hard! There was no doing things half-way for this girl.  Of course, you can imagine what my grandmother thought of that. She was a product of her times. I am sure she was told that women ‘glisten’ by her mother (or come to think of it, maybe her father).

Most of us women learn at some point that it isn’t lady-like to sweat, regardless of what name we give it. But, there’s nothing like a GOOD SWEAT. I was engaged in a delightful email conversation with my good friend Ellie this morning, and we shared what a great sweat we had just enjoyed. She’s a runner and mentioned that she had a wonderful run this morning that was “delicious…fresh air, orange sky & lots of sweat — the stuff that makes me happy most mornings”. I responded to her about my extraordinarily sweaty dance yesterday morning where, once again, I played hard…or I should say danced hard. I ended the two-plus hours of straight dancing INCREDIBLY SWEATY, and I felt absolutely and utterly clean and light from the inside out for the rest of the day.

I dance the 5Rhythms (developed by Gabrielle Roth), and on Sunday mornings I dance with 149 other beautiful souls in a two-hour silent practice called Sweat Your Prayers…and we do. We sweat. I do seem to sweat more than most of the others… something I guess I am used to since childhood, but I notice I sweat a LOT MORE than the other women. This used to bother me, until I realized I was holding myself back from fully diving into my practice.

As I dive deeper into the practice, I realize I am dancing much more deeply grounded, deep down in my legs, pelvis and core. And when I do, I sweat unabashedly. Heat gets generated, toxins are released, and I feel clean and light.

My friend Ellie says, “Isn’t sweating the BEST? It’s so under-appreciated. One of the main reasons I love running is the sweat factor…major cleansing from the inside out!. Funny, I use to sweat a lot during Bikram, but it wasn’t as satisfying a sweat.”

I concur! In my almost two-years of doing Bikram, I loved the sweating, but it wasn’t as satisfying. I wonder if that’s because when I dance, I am generating all the heat from within my body, dancing from deep within my core. The room certainly isn’t heated, although with 149 other people dancing in close proximity, there’s a lot of heat being generated.

So are you wondering yet, why I’m writing about SWEAT on Unabashedly Female? In corresponding with Ellie, I realized how much women are taught, at least in my day, that sweating wasn’t ‘lady-like’. I can STILL hear my grandmother (and mother’s) words.

But, I know how healthy and satisfying a GOOD SWEAT can be; AND, I wasn’t being me, wasn’t really dancing MY dance when I was holding back because of any old leftover worries about being TOO SWEATY. When I dance deeply, I invite others to do the same. When I sweat, I am IN MY BODY, loving the experience.

To sweat IS to glisten!

Being unabashedly sweaty is running/dancing/yogaing/etc. with full-on engagement. It’s about loving life and learning to love ourselves enough to embrace the gift of a GOOD SWEATY GLISTEN.

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